Nellie: The Life and Loves of a Diva by Robert Wainwright

Author:Robert Wainwright [Wainwright, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781838955090
Google: X5imzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2022-03-15T20:37:59+00:00

He was right on one score and wrong on another. The public expectation about her arrival at Covent Garden had helped boost ticket sales for the season to their highest level ever and Augustus Harris had welcomed Nellie with open arms. But he was wrong about Philippe who arrived in London not long after Nellie and had taken rooms at 94 Mount Street in Mayfair, suitably distant from Westminster although they would soon be openly visiting each other’s houses.

Philippe was in the audience at Covent Garden on Nellie’s opening night. It was a triumph: extra chairs were packed into the orchestra stalls, which normally accommodated four hundred and fifty patrons, and more chairs filled the crowded alleyways. Newspapers across Australia carried the same excited Reuters report which noted that the Prince and Princess of Wales had been in the royal box for Nellie’s performance and there had been numerous encores. ‘The critics agree in declaring that her voice has increased in strength and volume,’ the report crowed.

As powerful as her voice was that night, it was her acting that most critics noticed, with words like graceful and emotional replacing former observations about being wooden and stilted. It was as if she had thrown off the shackles of expectation and had truly grasped her place at the forefront of opera.

The appearance of royalty that night was significant, a public declaration of their friendship and respect for Nellie and a clear signal that her affair with Philippe had a royal nod of approval.

The Prince of Wales had been in court during the day as a witness in what was to become known as the ‘royal baccarat scandal’. It involved a card game played between a group of rich friends in a Yorkshire manor the previous year when one of the guests, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, had been found cheating. Gordon-Cumming pledged to never play again and then relented, accusing his friends of slander and taking them to court. He would lose the case but not before he forced the Prince of Wales to give evidence from the witness box, becoming the first royal brought involuntarily to court in more than four hundred years.

It had been a humiliating experience, courtroom sketches showing a rotund, unhappy man trying to avoid stares in a crowded room. Despite this, Edward insisted on going to the opera that evening to hear the soprano, to congratulate her publicly and then let it be known that she was invited to a private lunch at Marlborough House three days later.

Occasionally, newspaper social columns would mention Nellie and Philippe in the same account of a party or event, and their names both appeared among the most desired of the summer’s society photographs that could be bought from studios for two shillings a pop. But it was at the opera where their infatuation was displayed publicly because Philippe was in the family box every night she sang, the unabashed cheerleader for what would become known as ‘Melba nights’.

Melba herself, rather than the opera,

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